I Know You Know Who I Am

by Peter Kispert

  After the show, I find one of the contortionists at his spot outside the tent. He doesn’t look like he wants to talk—he’s stretching out a knot in his leg—but I ask him anyway. “Where do they go?”

  “Hell,” he says, plucking the cigarette from his mouth. “Even I don’t know.”

  MOORING

  It’s a true story because it’s a story I tell you. But you want the story with the facts, the stuff we both know. Everything that happened—so here it is.

  * * *

  —

  I had the nagging suspicion I’d chosen the wrong cabin from the moment we both arrived, parking just before dusk at the fork down the long gravel driveway. Inside, the larger things checked out: deer antlers mounted on a far wall, curving up in two thorny parentheses. A small blue vase on the dining room table, likely my mother’s, that had gathered dust. “Finn always loved these,” I said so Luke might overhear, picking up an old book of crosswords, mostly unfinished. I was waiting for Luke to ask what, but he was too far away. The crosswords felt like a gross metaphor, but my father really might have loved them. It might have been true.

  Okay, fine, I told myself. I’m a liar—I lie. I was in my father’s cabin and had told Luke it was Finn’s. You do what you need to, to save what you need. To close one story and open a chance for the truth.

  Luke walked around the house, doubling back while looking at the ceiling for some way up to the roof. I was surprised to hear the slide of collapsible stairs and raised my voice to ask how he’d found them. “Believe it or not, I grew up in a place just like this!” His footsteps shook the metal beams and thudded onto the roof.

  I felt a paranoid jump in my heart, remembering a scene from months back: From my cheap seats on the balcony, I saw Luke below in the crowded orchestra, waiting for a show to start. I looked for who had gone with him, who he had taken instead of me. When the light onstage cast even a momentary glow back onto the audience, I tried to see his shadow in the darkness. I missed most of the production, constantly waiting to see, to have my paranoia justified, but never learned for certain if he’d really taken anyone. I started having two distinct nightmares, both about that moment, in which he was either gone or right next to me, smiling, a warm hand on my thigh. These were my options—romance or death. Sometimes I added another element to that pain, imagining Finn as the person next to him, the lines of my stories blurring away.

  Pushing my father/Finn’s tattered curtains aside, gazing out at the thick forest of pines he had planted before I was born, I did not see any light from the neighboring cabin between those branches. The Realtor had mentioned the place was “on the right, you’ll see,” but it wasn’t until after I had arrived and opened the car door to that syrupy air, after we walked into the mudroom that smelled like wet dog, the place unlocked as I’d been told it would be, no numbers or mailboxes, just tall weeds, overgrown—that I considered I had misunderstood. Out the window, the trees swayed ominously in the dusk. I entered the whole scene of the cabin as an actor might, waiting for his chance to dart off into the wings, for the curtain to close.

  The kitchen, the marble sink, the bathroom—did not feel familiar exactly, but I had prepared myself not to recognize much. It also felt oddly lived in, though of course my Finn had passed only a few days before.

  Twenty-two years he had lived here. My father. Finn—how long? Five, I decided, in case I needed that knowledge later. I leaned against the marble counter, considering, just to myself. Why did I get the place? Four siblings, all of whom were alive, all of whom were on better terms with my father than I was. The only explanation I could think of is that the place was a kind of gift, the result of all that sorrow bubbling up last minute. (My sister had agreed: “Kind of a shit little place,” she’d said. “I keep forgetting you haven’t been.”) She resented that I had been chosen to inherit it, I could tell; every few months we spoke, she’d laughed about her plans for the land, a quaint summer getaway with her husband. She mentioned a bulldozer once, in a way that felt violating, like retribution for something she’d never told me. I imagined lines struck through in my father’s will with a shaking hand, my name written in.

  Footsteps thudded overhead, Luke making his way back to the hatch, and rain began to strike the glass. Little scars, one after the next.

  “Babe,” Luke said. “You didn’t tell me you invited anyone.”

  “What?” Instantly, I imagined creating a friend for Finn, then anxiously swatted the idea away.

  “Are they bringing food?” Luke added. “That fridge is weird.”

  “Who?” I walked to the fridge. A fresh wave of nausea roiled inside me. Six cases of beer, stacked. Half a discount apple pie. And milk, with a far-off enough expiration date to confirm my fear in a flash: We were in the wrong house.

  “That pie is fine,” Luke said, defeated. “I guess.”

  A beam of light moved across a far wall, shadows stretching like something out of a horror movie, contorting silhouettes. Headlights. The rain coming down harder, sky burning with the first rumbles of thunder.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, taking Luke’s hand.

  “I’m sorry!” Luke said. “The apple is fine, really!”

  I took my wallet and phone from the table and led him to what looked like a guest bedroom farthest from the entrance, with the confidence of someone who knew where the guest bedroom would be.

  “What’s going on?”

  This was Luke, trusting me enough to tell him the truth, giving me, what, chance number five to prove I wasn’t just inventing things to keep him around, to keep him from seeing me? But the truth was something I’d thrown away long ago. Unlike the milk, it had expired. But my story was starting to congeal. Rain began to pound the roof in waves, its soothing sound threatening me.

  Luke knew I had not seen Finn in years (okay, ever) and had never been to his place before (because it did not exist). The story I had told Luke was generously edited. Sometimes redrafted. At one point in it Finn had threatened suicide and I’d made it halfway through the Maine wilderness midwinter, my car hitting old mud ruts, before he’d called me, when I’d finally gotten service and he told me that he was okay. All those details sealing me inside the story as I told it to Luke: the pine needles shedding onto my windshield as I backed into the trunk of a tree, turning around to go home. Those cuts raining down.

  I’d told Luke something else, a buffer to the truth, buried so far beneath me: My father’s home had been twice ransacked; he’d moved to the middle of Maine for a job finding water for wells and lost the position for no good reason, his four kids each, independently, too busy to visit. But I’d dug dirt over that too—I added to it my father as an alcoholic who routinely reached for tequila at 8 a.m.

  Underneath all this? Fine. The honest mistreatment hadn’t come from him, but from a teacher in middle school, who in the seventh grade had kissed me against the chalkboard during recess—with the blinds pulled down, I could see through the small line of visibility in one window kids playing on the soccer field as the back of my T-shirt collected chalk from practice problems. When I began to resist, I started getting bad grades. Humiliated in front of the class. Never the right answer. My life nose-dived, a plane engine cut midflight. Whole years wiped away from the crash. My gayness confused my parents, and there was so much blame, in every direction, that it became impossible to explain, pointless to dole out. A knot I couldn’t untangle, a knot I was tangled in.

  So the story I offered, the glimmering surface of the water, was something I thought Luke would understand, one night over wine, trying to pull him closer to me after imagining him in that theater with someone else. I poured the pain into another cup, with a different story, one in which my father had spit the word “pansy” in my face, holding my wrists down on the twin bed, making a regular show of his homophobic rage, drinking the kind and amount of hard liquor that could “kill a man easy, any day.” I
told Luke he had died years ago, not just now, and I remembered him tipping out the last residue of the wine from its bottle, right after I had said those words. And how I wanted to start over, but I thought, if there were a way to fall in love, both of us together, whatever real love was, maybe it had the power to erase that story, to make it about us in the now, and not about who I used to be, or who had said what, because I was changing, I really was, and I wasn’t sure if he could tell.

  And then, this. A free house. “It’s gross,” my sister insisted. But I indulged Luke, when I told him Finn had finally passed, that moment washing over me in a tropical surf. He told me the visit was part of a healing process, and I wanted more than anything to show him I could heal.

  The man’s bags hit a door, closer than I expected.

  “What the hell is going on?” Luke asked.

  “Okay, I don’t really know—” I started, but backtracked. I needed to be confident. “Okay, I do know, but this is just going to sound crazy.”

  “What?” Luke said. He sounded almost defiant. Something in his voice told me he knew I was lying. Or at least heading in that direction.

  “Okay. So. Finn, he had some people after him. Old money stuff.”

  Old money stuff. Seriously? The best I could do.

  “Old money stuff?” Luke said. He sat on the bed, which creaked with his weight, so he stood up fast. It made him touchy. I had mentioned bailing Finn out, twice. Where I’d left him, in that story, he was fine, a thick slab of my savings tossed out to him. A life raft I’d in truth needed myself.

  “Are they here for something?” Luke asked, confused.

  “Probably,” I said. “That’s probably it.”

  Luke was getting manic, and it pleased me in a small way that I had the upper hand on reason, or maybe just a moronic sense of calm.

  “Do you have everything you came in with?”

  Luke paused and looked at me. So dramatic. I wanted to slap him for being such a queen about this. Grow up, I thought, and briefly appreciated the irony of that sentiment.

  “My camera,” Luke said.

  The front door creaked open, the screen door snapping shut. The heavy sound of boots on the floor, plastic grocery bags crinkling in the silence.

  “Well,” Luke whispered loudly, “there’s my food.”

  I doubled down on the concern and gave him a shhh.

  We moved close to the window, staying low. If worse came to worst—well, I wouldn’t know what to do then. The sound of boots stopped, and we froze. A man’s voice through chewing—“The fuck is this?”

  “My camera. Oh no.”

  “Why did you even bring that?”

  “I thought we could get some pics up here.”

  “At Finn’s place, right after he died. Nice,” I said. My allegiance to the lie was so strong this came from a place of reflex, not thought, and for a moment it scared me more than the man, who I guess—lucky us—was staying put in the kitchen. A beer cracked.

  “Oh God, what was that?” Luke said, clutching his heart.

  “It was literally a beer.”

  “What in the shit?” the man said to himself. He had found the camera. I listened closely, unsure if, or maybe hoping that, someone else was so deep in their lie, layers and layers down like me, that it was really my father coming home after all these years, unlacing his shoes. It moved me more than I realized to think I might be hiding from exactly him, and it required almost a physical push for me to say no to the idea. No, this man was not my father.

  “What was on that camera?” I asked Luke. “Exactly?”

  “Us. And some shots from the roof. Can we distract him? What does he want from us?”

  “Probably not sex.” I laughed, finding it funny.

  “Should we bust the window?”

  The masculine quality to the words “bust the window” caught on me for a moment, before it occurred to me this stranger likely had a gun somewhere, maybe on him, maybe like my father did, all those years I didn’t call or visit, the glow of the television monitor back on him alone late at night. A chill shot out from my heart. Just as I was about to say, in all seriousness, Yes, let’s break glass and cause a scene, the boots started toward us.

  “If he finds us, we’re not a couple,” Luke said to me.

  The night turned hopeless with a litany of questions, the answers to which I did not have and knew did not exist. What was I trying to save now? Which story did I want the most? The time to choose had long since passed, but it felt still like the time to choose. Maybe there would be another time to choose—days, weeks down the road, back in Boston, a new glass of wine with Luke. The thought pulled me up, a rope down the well of my despair.

  A door closed one room over, the sound of a lifted toilet seat.

  “Go!” I whispered loudly to Luke, and we crept fast back into the kitchen and got to the door and opened it before Luke swung around and said, full volume, “He has photos of us.”

  This had not occurred to me at any point either. And then I imagined the fingerprints.

  I mean, come on, I asked myself, master inventor of lies, maker of illusion, spell caster of self-sabotage—and you can’t get yourself out of this one?

  “Call the police,” Luke told me. “He’s trespassing. On Finn’s property. My phone’s in the car.” We stepped out into the rain, and I watched Luke’s hair as it became slick. Everything would have been fine if the man didn’t have Luke’s camera, which was at the exact moment this thought revealing our identities as intruders in his story.

  “I can’t. No service,” I told Luke. But actually, there was. Three bars of it.

  “Let me see your phone,” Luke said. “I can maybe get service.”

  “Do we even need the camera?”

  “Let me see your phone!”

  “No. He’s probably out of the bathroom by now. We need to go—that guy is dangerous.”

  But the real danger? There was no way out. I had found the last room in our story, the one with no more doors or windows, which I had known was waiting for me this whole time. I told Luke I’d heard—okay, fine, this is a confession? I told Luke about men who used to come to Finn’s house, pounding on the door with a pistol. “See these marks?” I said in the useless dark. “We have to go now.” And they once held him up against the side of this cabin. Splinters in his back. And he looked at me like I was an idiot, because apparently I had told you before that Finn never opened the door for strangers, and how could I even see those marks, and I could feel my father disappearing through all of this telling, and then you saw my phone because you took it from me, and I had to stop you from calling the police, and I told you I was sorry, quietly, and then you asked me what was true. And I think the lightning flashed a branching vein across the sky and the man turned off a light and everything was suddenly bright before it was suddenly dark and I couldn’t see you anymore. Then I wished I’d entertained my wild idea to cast Finn, to prove him to be real, to breathe the same air so maybe with time we could both forget, and not break the glass like this.

  Two gunshots in the night, my heart a trapped animal inside the trapped animal that was me. And you didn’t even want to hear me confess. You hated the truth, as it grabbed us by the collar, and so did I. And that’s the end.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t get far into all of this before you told me to stop talking. On the drive home, along the never-ending ocean, past that circus tent, a dark triangle propped up against the sky, I said I would write it all down objectively, from my perspective. So there it is. We are still somewhere up in Maine together in that camera, though I’m sure you try not to think about that. And I do have an explanation, though you said you didn’t want one. We tell lies to make ourselves believe the stories we have, to sink them deeper into us, so we don’t forget. So we can’t. That’s maybe the only thing I do k
now.

  But here’s what I want to know—did you feel it? Taking those photos with that camera, our backs to the sun, that salty July air, bare assed on those rocks in Nantucket? A boat came by with its big white sail waving, and we joked about swimming out to it and scaring whoever owned it off and just riding it away? It’s like that. Just because we live inside a lie, doesn’t mean we don’t feel the truth thrum through us, or that we can’t sometimes breathe underwater in it, just for a moment.

  I know you can’t see it. And I know you know that. But I jumped into the water for you. I swam out and then that boat really was mine, and ever since, I’ve been trying to find my way back, to find the right port. To stand on solid ground. To finally come, and find you.

  PUBLICATION CREDITS

  Stories in this collection have appeared in The Journal, Slice, The Carolina Quarterly, Passages North, Devil’s Lake, Tin House, Hobart, South Dakota Review, Joyland, and Ninth Letter.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you first and foremost to my incredible agent Caroline Eisenmann at Frances Goldin Literary Agency and my extraordinary editor Victoria Savanh at Penguin Books. Your belief in these stories has been unwavering, and I could not be luckier to work with both of you.

  To Preston Witt and Brett Beach at The Journal, Jennifer Howard and Matt Wienkam at Passages North, Lee Ann Roripaugh at South Dakota Review, Maisie Cochran and Thomas Ross at Tin House, Kyle Lucia Wu and Michelle Lyn King at Joyland, Carrie Schuettpelz at Devil’s Lake, Rae Yan at The Carolina Quarterly, Celia Johnson and Maria Gagliano at Slice Magazine, Aaron Burch at Hobart, Tara Laskowski at SmokeLong Quarterly, E. B. Bartels at Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Matthew Minicucci at Ninth Letter, and Carmen Johnson and Morgan Parker at Day One, as well as the dedicated staffs of these journals: Thank you so much for your excellent edits and time with my work.